On 14 November, Mozilla released a new version of Firefox called Quantum, which is literally a quantum leap in performance over the previous versions. Mozilla says the new version 57 is twice as fast as the previous version and takes about 30% less memory compared to competitors (cough Chrome cough).

They have made lot of performance improvements to the browser core and takes better advantage of the latest hardware and better memory handling because of a better programming language.

Anyway, I have been using Firefox 57 as my primary browser for the past 5 days and there has been a significant improvement in the overall performance of my laptop as a result of this. Previously when I was using Chrome, the Memory pressure in the Activity Monitor always showed yellow and many times in red. After quitting Chrome, I have been consistently in the green and the entire computer feels responsive.

If you want to use a fast and responsive browser, but don’t want to close all other applications to run just your browser, check out the new Firefox. But what good is a browser without all the extensions? Here are the 7 extensions I installed as soon as I started using Quantum.

0. Pocket

You don’t have to install the Pocket extension as Firefox Quantum has it built-in (after it was acquired in February 2017). You just have to sign in to your pocket account and start saving web pages to be read later. This isn’t a big deal if you don’t use Pocket a lot. But personally I use it and I have already written about how I use Zapier to save my Pocket entries as bookmarks in Pinboard.

0.5 Screenshot

This is also a built-in feature in the new Firefox. This screenshot tool is much better than the Awesome Screenshot extension I used in Chrome. I can take screenshots of specific div or sections on the page. Firefox also provides free storage space for the screenshots. You can also set expiry date for each screenshot. This makes it easy to share screenshots with my team.

If you are a Chrome user, you must have used the built-in Profiles feature. You can start completely new browser instances with separate sessions, cookies and history for your personal and work. I used to have separate profiles for my Gmail, Work, and other domains that I manage.

This does have a problem as sometimes I open a tab in one profile, which I want to open in another. Example, every day I have setup Rescuetime to open a page to log my achievements and it opens a tab in a different browser window in which I haven’t signed in. I always wanted to have separate profiles for just a few websites and one common default profile for everything else.

Firefox’ Containers does it better. You can assign multiple Containers for each of your task, example personal, work, Shopping, banking, etc. You also have a default container, which is what opens whenever you click on any link from other applications. This makes it easy to have only specific websites to be containerized and other pages to be opened in default setting.

To manage the Containers, you have to use this Multi Account Container extension. You can customize your containers, give them names and customize it with different colors. You can also set specific domains to always open in specific containers – like your bank website to always open in Banking container.

I use LastPass as my password manager – to save and sync my passwords across multiple browsers. By just installing and logging in, I am able to sign in to all my websites without having to remember any password. I just have to remember one master passphrase and I don’t care how complex my passwords on individual sites are.

I usually auto generate most of the passwords using LastPass, (sometimes with reaaallly long lengths). I don’t worry if any one site is compromised, I can just change the password on that one site.

Everyone uses adblockers nowadays, that’s a given. Previously Adblock Plus was the most popular extension, then uBlock became popular because it was lightweight on CPU and memory. uBlock then got forked to uBlock Origin, as the creator had some issues with the spirit of the project. So uBlock Origin is the latest and actively developed fork. It blocks most of the ads on the web and even if it misses some, you can select an ad and block it.

This is an extension I was using in Chrome. When I have too many tabs open in a browser, I hit this OneTab button and all the unpinned tabs are saved in a separate tab and closed. This frees up your browser and mental space as you don’t have to be overwhelmed by the number of tabs that are open in the browser. Your memory also gets freed up, as all the tabs that were hogging your RAM is now closed. It also has an easy export tool which exports the URLs in a plain text format.

Just like I like to listen to podcasts at a much higher speed, I also have an extension to speed up my videos in the browser. I typically try to watch them at a 1.3x speed, beyond which I find it hard to catch up. Once you begin watching videos at a faster rate, you would start consuming more content through YouTube videos. I even used to watch Netflix series at a faster rate.

This is an extension which I use to clean up web pages which are content heavy. It removes all the sidebar and unnecessary content and formats the main text in a nice clean font which is easy on the eyes to read. You can also print the page or email it to someone.

On Chrome I used Mercury Reader, which had the added feature of sending the article directly to Kindle. But it isn’t available for Firefox.

This is a new extension I have started to use more as I have started to write more. Grammarly makes sure all of your text is clear, mistake-free and not have any gramatical errors. Once you add it to Firefox, it checks all text boxes and highlights how many errors are present. You can click it and see details about the errors and fix them in one click.

This is very useful as I usually write in Sublime Editor and copy-paste it into WordPress. Once it is pasted, Grammarly checks all the typos and grammatical mistakes and highlights them. I don’t know how I lived all these days without this.

What extensions do you use?

These are the extensions I have currently on my Firefox. I still haven’t install Pinboard, Evernote, Reddit Enhancement Suite, Enhanced Steam, and others which I had in my Chrome.

What are some of the extensions which you like? Leave them in the comments below.

I am a regular podcast listener even before the recent upsurge of numerous podcast shows that has cropped up in recent times. This year I have listened to a record number of podcast episodes. I have learned a lot from them and I have also improved the way I listen and take notes. In this post, I will explain why and where I listen to podcasts, how I listen at nearly 2x speeds and the quickest way to take notes.

Why listen to podcasts?

The reason I listen to podcasts is very simple. Podcasts allow me to sit through a conversation between two important people who you could never meet in real life. I can be a “fly on the wall” listening to their conversation, learning from the best minds in the word.

Just imagine being able to sit with some of the brilliant marketers, entrepreneurs, copywriters, and other heroes and listen to their story. You get an hour of quality time with them and you don’t even have to ask them any questions. The host is doing all the hard work of researching about them and making the conversation interesting.

Where do I listen?

There are only a few places where I listen to podcasts. Occasionally I drive to work and I listen to few episodes during my drive. But since my commute is only about 20 minutes, I can squeeze in one episode maximum (I will tell one trick to listen to a 30-minute episode in 20 minutes).

Sometimes when I drop my wife at her office (which takes at least an hour) I can get some real quality time listening to more than 1 episode or one longer episode. However, I can listen to podcasts only when I am lonely in the car. My wife doesn’t like to listen to podcasts and would plug in her iPhone and play music.

When I Uber to work, I don’t listen to podcasts as the driver sometimes talk to me or ask directions and I don’t want to be rude.

Other times, I walk a bit and come back home on a train or sometimes even walk all the way home. This takes at least 1.5 hours and this gives me some serious podcast listening time. Of course one has to be mindful of the surroundings with earphones plugged in when walking on the roads.

A decent pair of wireless earphones makes it easy to listen to podcasts when walking. Since it’s all speech, I don’t care about the audio quality too much.

I have tried to listen to podcasts when I get onto the bed, but unfortunately, after 5 minutes I doze off and the podcast keeps playing for hours before I pause it. So I avoid listening in the bed.

How do I listen?

I use the Overcast podcast app for iPhone. I would say this is the best podcast app for iPhone. To my knowledge, this is the only app which has the “Smart Speed” feature, which shortens unwanted silences and other fillers in conversations. You can get 1.15x speed increase just by turning on “Smart Speed” with no noticeable difference in speech.

I go even one step further, where I increase the playback speed. I have heard of people go crazy speeds like 2x or 3x. But I have found that 1.75x is the maximum that I can sustain, especially when I am driving.

It isn’t too hard to train your ear and brain to start listening to 2x speeds. As you keep listening to speech and conversations at higher speeds, your brain automatically processes it without any loss of information. There are visually impaired people who have screen readers speaking at 5x speeds. Those are crazier compared to the 1.75x I listen to.

Along with the Smart Speed feature, I can hit 1.9-2x speed and that is a good enough pace to listen to podcasts. Once you start listening to such high speeds, if you try to go back to the old normal speed, it would feel as if everyone is deliberately slowing things down and it begins to feel funny.

How to get the most out of podcasts?

Podcasts are useless if you just keep listening to them and going on to the next episode. You are spending a significant time listening to it and it would all go to waste if you didn’t have a method to take notes of the episodes. I tried a variety of tools to take notes, here are them all.

Ask Siri to “make a note”

When listening, you can just say “Hey Siri, make a note. <insert your nugget of information>. I usually turn off the “Hey Siri” feature and prefer pressing the physical button to activate Siri. When driving, I can long press the phone button on my steering wheel to activate Siri.

But the problem with this is many times Siri doesn’t transcribe my message properly and I missed a lot of messages. Also, Siri would assume that the message is completed even though I am still talking.

Ask Siri to “record a voice memo”

Another option is to ask Siri to “record a voice memo” which opens up the voice recorder. Now you can talk speak your message and it gets recorded in your own voice. This is much better than making a note.

But voice recorder is all hidden away and I prefer to use a much simpler tool for recording short notes.

Send a Whatsapp message to yourself

Initially, I was sending voice messages and short notes to my wife and she was getting confused why I sent unrelated messages. Then I started sending Whatsapp messages to myself. Yes, you can send messages to yourself (sort of).

To do that, you have to first create a group with one other person. Name this group and then remove the other person from the group. Now you have a group with just yourself. Name it as “me” or “Myself”. Now you can send short messages and notes to yourself.

I prefer this nowadays as I have a history of all the messages and voice memos. Now I have a long history of conversations containing little nuggets of information, which I can later research on and move to my permanent Evernote notebook.

Listen to important episodes again

If you have some important episode which has so much information, it would make sense to listen to it again, and again. The goal here is to not memorize the content but to listen to it again in a different setting which will allow you to pick some new useful information every time.

I have noticed this when watching some comedy movies, on watching it once more, you unearth some small piece of comedy or dialogue which you missed earlier. I have experienced this during podcast episodes too. For important episodes, I just note down the episode number and I listen to it again.

These are my tips to listening to podcasts. What are some of your tips and tricks? And how do you take notes of your favourite episodes? Leave them in the comments below.

I get ideas and topics to write in my blog during unusual time and places and I wanted to have an easy way to track them. Also I wanted to maintain an editorial calendar which can help track my progress with my November month Challenge of writing one blog post everyday.

I just have two requirements:

Ability to note down blog topics with the least possible efforts and sync it with my wordpress blog.

Plan and display the posts in a nice editorial calendar.

Past couple of weeks, I have been playing around with Zapier and one feature that I love is building custom zaps if there aren’t existing zaps which solve your problem. The first custom zap that I created was to sync blog topics from Airtable to WordPress.

Airtable -> WordPress

Airtable is basically a “spreadsheet without the confusing formulae and math functions”. You can easily create a lightweight spreadsheet/database which can be accessed programmatically. I created an “Editorial Calendar” base and a table for my blog.

In it, I had 5 columns: Title, Date Scheduled, Status, Category, Comments. And I keep creating new rows for each idea that I get.

The nice thing about Airtable is you can change how you view the spreadsheet. You can display it as a Calendar view based on the Date Scheduled field or as a Kanban view based on the status field.

For the Editorial Calendar I chose the Calendar view. Now I can drag and drop entries on the calendar and the date field will be automatically updated in.

After connecting both Airtable and WordPress, I created a zap. When a new record is created (trigger) in this particular table, it will create a new post in WordPress (action) and save it as draft. Now when I get an idea about a new blog topic, I just have to create an entry in the table.

I get the added advantage of displaying the list of posts as a calendar and as a Kanban board. The only disadvantage is you have to manually delete the posts after you have published it and all the history about the idea is now lost.

Trello -> WordPress

Another option I setup recently is to track the ideas in a Trello board and use a custom zap to save the draft when I create a new card. The steps are almost similar, except that you use Trello instead of Airtable to track ideas. And as I keep publishing new posts, I can move the cards to the right list. And after a few days I can archive the cards, maintaining the history about the idea.

For the calendar view, there is nice free WordPress plugin called Editorial Calendar which displays all the posts you have scheduled in a calendar. You can drag and reschedule posts too. And I can create an idea card template containing checklist of items to track before publishing the post and reuse that for all new ideas.

Sample of a Template card

I am trying out both Trello and Airtable to track my editorial calendar. Any kind of productivity tool needs experimentation and I am going to track how I use both to see if any one process fits my mental model.

I have been using Pinboard for nearly an year and it has been a great replacement for Delicious, except for one minor gripe: It doesn’t have a good app for iPhone. I read lot of articles on my phone and want an easy way to save them as unread bookmarks in Pinboard.

The official way of sending an email to a secret email address sucks. I have to remember how to structure the email and it is an unwanted cognitive load. And composing and email and sending it requires more steps than clicking a button if there was an app.

After searching for many months I found one solution that seems to work. I frequently use Pocket to save articles that I want to read later (yes I know Pinboard also has read later feature). Since I already have Pocket installed on my mobile, I decided to create a trigger whenever I save articles to Pocket using Zapier.

If you didn’t know, Zapier is a like IFTTT(If this, then that), but on steroids. There are so many services and integrations that you can enable using Zapier. The best part is, even if you don’t have a particular recipe (or zap as they call it), as long as Zapier supports a website or service, you can plug and play it with any other service.

Anyway, I searched for a Pocket -> Pinboard zap and found someone had already created the recipe. I just had to authenticate my account for both the services and enable the zap.

Now whenever I want to save an article to Pinboard from my phone, I just save it to pocket (and also add tags) and it magically just appears on my Pinboard. If someone builds/has a nice app for Pinboard which doesn’t suck, let me know. Till then, this solution will suffice.

We humans are creatures of habit. We always want to do things which are good for our lives. Many times we are motivated to start running or exercise. But motivation only takes you so far. Only when an action or behaviour becomes a habit, true change occurs. There is a big difference between doing a task deliberately vs doing it as a habit.

You don’t think twice to brush your teeth when you wake up. Similarly, some of us are so addicted to checking twitter or facebook that it has become second nature to immediately reach out to the app when you unlock your phone. All these happen without you putting in any significant mental effort. They have become habits.

Forming habits

Lot of people have written about forming habits. The one common pattern or technique that everyone suggests is to make sure you repeat doing the tasks every day. This is also called as the Seinfeld Technique or Don’t Break the Chain.

Legend says that when Seinfeld was training to become a comedian, he hung a big calendar where he would mark a big red X on each day that he wrote a joke. He would just keep marking it everyday, and his goal was to not break the chain of Xs.

We are all humans and we do miss/break the chain sometimes. I would suggest to add one more rule. Just make sure that you don’t miss 2 days in a row. If you want to run every day, and missed out on one day, make sure you don’t miss a second day.

Habit List

The tool that I use is Habit List and it displays a calendar and color codes the items based on how many days you miss.

If you keep doing the tasks every day, your tasks are marked in green.

Miss one day, it turns yellow.

Miss more than one day, it turns red.

Just don’t let it turn red and you should be good enough to form your habit and be productive.

Is there any other tricks that you use to form habits or not break the chain? Please leave them in the comments below.

Have you felt proud of yourself because you could multi-task two or more things? As a programmer, I have also tried to do two tasks simultaneously. I naturally had a lot more items in my todo list and I tried to complete them all at once. I felt multitasking was the only way to improve productivity in work.

While my code is building or page is refreshing, I would quickly work on a different project or switch to a different tab on my browser to catch up on Reddit or Twitter. Or try to send an email.

Some smart guy once said “What isn’t measured doesn’t get improved.” As I grow older, I seem to understand this a lot.

If you want to fix a piece of code which is slow as hell, first start with measuring how slow it is really running. It is easy to hypothesize that it is slow because it is written in an interpretted language or it leaks memory and the garbage collector doesn’t work properly or various other reasons.

I am Srinivasan Rangarajan, (AKA) cnu. I love talking about Technology, Startups, Product Design, Marketing and related stuff. I have helped many startups build and scale their SaaS products to millions of users. Currently I head the Engineering Team at Mad Street Den.